Dr. Richard Lewontin, in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997:31 entitled Billions and Billions of Demons (reviewing the book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan) states:[3]

“

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravangant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstatiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.[3]

...the most secular nations in the world are those of East Asia, in particular what are often termed “Confucian societies.” It is likely therefore that the majority of the world’s atheists are actually East Asian...

In 2015, Rodney Stark wrote in his book The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever: "35 percent of the French believe in astrology, 35 percent of the Swiss agree that 'some fortune tellers really can foretell the future'..."[6]

Atheism, scientism and the limitations of science

Scientism is the belief that the scientific method has no (or few) limits and can successfully be applied to almost all aspects of life, and provides an explanation for everything. It is essentially a religion where its followers (Scientists) worship science its rituals, and its results.[13]

In addition, many atheists have an inordinate degree of confidence in the consensus opinions of scientists instead of possessing a healthy degree of skepticism.[15]

Strict scientism as a worldview is self-refuting since the scientism cannot be proven to be true through science.[16] For other significant problems with scientism as far as its unworkability, please see William Lane Craig's commentary on scientism entitled Is scientism self-refuting?.

Atheists, scientism and the limitations of science

Atheists who hold to scientism and/or are science fetishists, often fail to have an appreciation for the limitations of science.[17]

Experimental evidence that the prayers of Bible believers are effective

Furthermore, there is experimental evidence supporting the proposition that the God of the Bible does answer prayers.[18] The Christian apologist Gary Habermas wrote: "Double-blind prayer experiments: where people pray for others with terminal illness. Habermas admitted that most such experiments have not worked, but the three that he knows of that have indeed worked were cases of orthodox-Christians praying for the sick."[18]

Percentage of American scientists who believe in God

In 2009, the Pew Research Center indicated: "According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power."[19]

Medical doctors believe in God more than social scientists. Medical science is often more reliable than social science

Few, if any, political scientists predicted early on that Donald Trump would win the Republican primary and then would subsequently be elected president of the United States. Furthermore, most pollsters indicated that Trump would lose the election.

27 percent of American political scientists believe in the existence of God while 76 percent of American doctors said they believe in God.[20]

Compared to medical science which has many effective medicines and surgical procedures, the social science of political science is often unreliable.

Physical sciences, social sciences and reliability

In an article entitled How reliable are the social sciences?, Cary Cutting wrote in the New York Times:

“

While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled experiments, which are seldom possible when people are involved. For one thing, we are too complex: our behavior depends on an enormous number of tightly interconnected variables that are extraordinarily difficult to distinguish and study separately. Also, moral considerations forbid manipulating humans the way we do inanimate objects. As a result, most social science research falls far short of the natural sciences’ standard of controlled experiments.[21]

”

In 2014, the science journal Nature reported that over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test.[22]

Doctors, social scientists and belief in God

NBC News reported: "In the survey of 1,044 doctors nationwide, 76 percent said they believe in God, 59 percent said they believe in some sort of afterlife, and 55 percent said their religious beliefs influence how they practice medicine."[23]

Compared to medical science which has many effective medicines and surgical procedures, social science is often unreliable. For example, few economists (economics is a social science) in academia predicted the Great Depression or the 1987 financial crisis. Ludwig von Mises was snubbed by economists worldwide when he warned of a credit crisis in the 1920s.[25] Few, if any, political scientists predicted early on that Donald Trump would win the Republican primary and the would subsequently win the 2016 presidential election.

The abstract for the journal article Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research which was published in The American Political Science Review indicated "Scholars routinely make claims that presuppose the validity of the observations and measurements that operationalize their concepts. Yet, despite recent advances in political science methods, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to measurement validity."[26]

The political scientist Emily Thorson wrote at the Politico website:

“

Late last semester, a student showed up during my office hours. She sat down across from me, looking worried. I assumed she wanted to discuss her upcoming paper, but she had something else in mind. “Professor,” she said. “How did Donald Trump happen?”

This is the question everyone seems to be asking these days. Trump’s rise has defied the predictions of pundits and pollsters, repeatedly embarrassing those who swore that he would flame out. I’m a political scientist, and I count myself among that number. In September, I offered my students a $500 bet that he wouldn’t become the Republican nominee — a wager I’m increasingly glad that none of them took me up on.[27]

The economist and sociologist Karl Marx said "[Religion] is the opium of the people". Marx also stated: "Communism begins from the outset (Owen) with atheism; but atheism is at first far from being communism; indeed, that atheism is still mostly an abstraction.[29]

Political philosophy, or political theory is considered by some political scientists as a sub-discipline of political science. The political theorist Vladimir Lenin similarly wrote regarding atheism and communism: "A Marxist must be a materialist, i.e., an enemy of religion, but a dialectical materialist, i.e., one who treats the struggle against religion not in an abstract way, not on the basis of remote, purely theoretical, never varying preaching, but in a concrete way, on the basis of the class struggle which is going on in practice and is educating the masses more and better than anything else could."[30]

Marxism is an revolutionary movement developed by the German scholar and activist Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels. Marx's approach is indicated by the opening line of the Communist Manifesto (1848): “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. Marx believed that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction.

Communism, as it emerged around 1918-20, was a late political manifestation of Marxist philosophy. Lenin in Russia and later Mao Zedong in China tailored Marx's ideas it to their expedient political needs.

Eventually, the communist Soviet Union collapsed due to: an inferior economic system, lack of personal liberties for its populace due to excessive central government control and an economy burdened by militarism.[31]

Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, asked Castro if Cuba's economic system was still worth exporting to other countries, and Castro replied: "The Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore," Goldberg wrote Wednesday in a post on his Atlantic blog.

The Cuban government had no immediate comment on Goldberg's account.[32]

”

Communism and mass murder

It is estimated that in the past 100 years, governments under the banner of atheistic communism have caused the death of somewhere between 40,472,000 and 259,432,000 human lives.[33] Dr. R. J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is the scholar who first coined the term democide (death by government). Dr. R. J. Rummel's mid estimate regarding the loss of life due to communism is that communism caused the death of approximately 110,286,000 people between 1917 and 1987.[34]

The atheist psychologist Sigmund Freud promoted pseudoscience

Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior and the practical application of psychological therapy. Unfortunately, the field of psychology is riddled with sloppy work, pseudoscience and scientific fraud (see: Psychology and pseudoscience).

Freud was a proponent of the notion that theism was detrimental to mental health.[39]Oxford Professor Alister McGrath, author of the book The Twilight of Atheism, stated the following regarding Freud:

“

One of the most important criticisms that Sigmund Freud directed against religion was that it encourages unhealthy and dysfunctional outlooks on life. Having dismissed religion as an illusion, Freud went on to argue that it is a negative factor in personal development. At times, Freud's influence has been such that the elimination of a person's religious beliefs has been seen as a precondition for mental health.

Freud is now a fallen idol, the fall having been all the heavier for its postponement. There is now growing awareness of the importance of spirituality in health care, both as a positive factor in relation to well-being and as an issue to which patients have a right. The "Spirituality and Healing in Medicine" conference sponsored by Harvard Medical School in 1998 brought reports that 86 percent of Americans as a whole, 99 percent of family physicians, and 94 percent of HMO professionals believe that prayer, meditation, and other spiritual and religious practices exercise a major positive role within the healing process.[39]

In an article also published in this issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Mayo Clinic researchers reviewed published studies, meta-analyses, systematic reviews and subject reviews that examined the association between religious involvement and spirituality and physical health, mental health, health-related quality of life and other health outcomes.

The authors report a majority of the nearly 350 studies of physical health and 850 studies of mental health that have used religious and spiritual variables have found that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes.[40]

”

Lack of significant study by psychologists about atheism

Dr. Melanie Brewster gave a talk entitled Why is Psychology Silent When it Comes to Atheism? and she indicated there is a general reluctance of psychologists to study the atheist population.[41]

Atheism and historical revisionism

Atheism, Christianity and the foundation of modern science

The birth of modern science occurred in Christianized Europe.[42]SociologistRodney Stark investigated the individuals who made the most significant scientific contributions between 1543 and 1680 A.D., the time of the Scientific Revolution.
In Stark's list of 52 top scientific contributors,[43] only one (Edmund Halley) was a skeptic and another (Paracelsus) was a pantheist.
The other 50 were Christians, 30 of whom could be characterized as being devout Christians.[43]
Sir Francis Bacon, sometimes referred to as "the Father of Modern Science", wrote in his essay entitled Of Atheism the following: "I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind."[44]

Secular scientific community and their grasp of logic, statistics and history/philosophy of science

As far as atheists in the scientific community, Theodore Beale correctly points out that many atheist scientists (and scientists in general) have a poor grasp of logic, statistics, the history/philosophy of science and other matters which often causes them to reach erroneous conclusions and engage in pseudoscience.[45]

Science journal and science magazine quotes about atheism and theism

“Atheism is psychologically impossible because of the way humans think... They point to studies showing, for example, that even people who claim to be committed atheists tacitly hold religious beliefs, such as the existence of an immortal soul.” - Graham Lawton in the New Scientist science magazine [47]

“A slew of cognitive traits predisposes us to faith.” - Pascal Boyer, in the British science journal Nature[47]

Michael Egnor on atheism and science

Of course we need an intelligent authority to explain the universe. The universe is shot through with intelligibility. Nature is governed by astonishingly complex and elegant physical laws, and the laws themselves are written in the language of abstract mathematics. In fact, theoretical physicists must often explore utterly new mathematical theories in order to explain the behavior of inanimate matter...

Atheism, in fact, has a dismal record in science. For much of the 20th century, a third of humanity lived under the boot of atheist ideology. What was the great science produced by atheist scientists in the Soviet Union? What are the scientific contributions of Communist China and Cuba and Vietnam and Albania? Compare the scientific output of East Germany (atheist) to that of West Germany (Lutheran and Catholic). Compare the scientific output of North Korea (atheist) to that of South Korea (Christian and Buddhist).[48]

”

Decline of the authority of the scientific community and the failure of the secularization thesis

↑John Lennox. Same evidence, different conclusions: how?. Science and Ethics. Retrieved on 2011-03-05. “Some atheists are quite explicit that their atheism comes first. One of the most famous is Richard Lewontin, a profesor of genetics, who said it wasn't science that compelled him to accept a materialistic explanation of the universe. It was an a priori materialism. You start with that materialism and he said that materialism is absolute.”

↑ 3.03.1Shmuel Waldman. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Convincing Evidence of the Truths of Judaism. Feldheim Publishers. Retrieved on 2011-03-05. “Consider the following remark made by Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books, January 9, 1997:31 entitled Billions and Billions of Demons (reviewing the book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan): "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravangant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It's not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that Materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."”

↑Investigating atheism: Marxism. University of Cambridge (2008). Retrieved on July 17, 2014. “The most notable spread of atheism was achieved through the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which brought the Marxist-Leninists to power. For the first time in history, atheism thus became the official ideology of a state.”